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Marquette awarded grant to study emergency room dental care

A Marquette University researcher has received a $300,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how hospital emergency rooms provide non-traumatic dental treatments.

Christopher Okunseri, an associate professor of dental public health, will use the money to study populations seeking dental care in emergency departments. He will also explore which medications they are receiving for non-traumatic dental conditions such as cavities or bleeding gums, and whether there are related racial and ethnic disparities.

"Are people presenting to the ER with the same condition getting the same thing? If they present with bleeding gums, do they receive ibuprofen or narcotics?" Okunseri asked.

If people with the same conditions are receiving different medications, Okunseri says his work might lead to national guidelines. It could even spur the idea of setting up 24-hour dental clinics in emergency rooms, he said.

Okunseri has spent the last three years mining public data to study the problem.

He was lead author of a December 2008 paper in the Journal of the American Dental Association showing African-Americans, Native Americans, and people in areas with dental health professional shortages were more likely to use emergency rooms for non-traumatic dental problems. The paper was based on analysis of all Medicaid dental claims in Wisconsin from 2001 through 2003.

Issues with dental care, particularly for underserved populations, are "the dirty little secret when you think about health care in general," said Glenn Flores, a co-author of the paper who is a professor and pediatrics director at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, part of the University of Texas System.

"What Chris is doing has tremendous implications not only in Wisconsin, but nationally, because there's such poor access to dental care," Flores said.